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The Seven Piagetian Conservation Tasks

Children in the early preoperational period fail at conservation tasks involving number, length, liquid, mass, and volume as they judge based on outward appearance rather than understanding the concepts are unchanged. While late preoperational children may pass some tasks, it is not until the concrete operational period that children can provide logical justifications for conservation judgments. The seven conservation concepts are acquired sequentially rather than simultaneously, with number conservation typically by age 5-6 and volume conservation often not until 9-10, posing difficulty for Piaget's theory.

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Liyana Mokhtar
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166 views3 pages

The Seven Piagetian Conservation Tasks

Children in the early preoperational period fail at conservation tasks involving number, length, liquid, mass, and volume as they judge based on outward appearance rather than understanding the concepts are unchanged. While late preoperational children may pass some tasks, it is not until the concrete operational period that children can provide logical justifications for conservation judgments. The seven conservation concepts are acquired sequentially rather than simultaneously, with number conservation typically by age 5-6 and volume conservation often not until 9-10, posing difficulty for Piaget's theory.

Uploaded by

Liyana Mokhtar
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The Seven Piagetian Conservation Tasks

Several physical quantities are unchanged, or conserved in the face of spatial


or configurational transformations.  As Piaget noted, children in the early
preoperational period fail on all of these tasks, typically giving answers that
conform to the most salient dimension (e.g., in the number conservation task,
3- and 4-year-olds typically state that the longer transformed line has 'more'). 
Children in the late preoperational period often succeed at some of these
tasks, but fail to provide adequate justifications for their judgments.  It is not
until the concrete operational period that children can reliably supply logical
justifications, such as reversibility, for conservation.

The seven tasks are not acquired at once.  instead, they are acquired in the
order listed here, with conservation of number typically mastered by 5 or 6,
but conservation of volume often not mastered until 9 or 10.  This was
something of an embarrassment for Piaget, who invoked the notion of
decalage ('uncoupling') in an attempt to explain why such structurally similar
concepts should be acquired at such diverse ages.
 

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